Aranmanai 4 Review: A House Full Of Terrifying Clichés

Director: Sundar C

Writers: Sundar C, Nasir

Cast: Sundar C, Tamannaah Bhatia, Raashi Khanna

Duration: 145 mins

Available in: Theatres

An unsettling moment — often a good marker in the genre — in Aranmanai 4 comes on early. A young girl in Bengal becomes the vessel of an evil, amphibian spirit (do with that description what you will). But instead of running away from this being, the girl’s father talks that spirit into becoming an imposter of his daughter. All of this as the film peels our attention away from this brilliant idea and takes us to its title card. A timely reminder that the film isn’t about the small glimmers in horror, but a bigger, louder haunted house. 

Being part of a franchise as big as this does come with its own traps, and Aranmanai 4, tries ever so slightly to right some of its wrongs. So, instead of an elaborate character exposition, the film begins at full tilt with the suicide of one of its leads (Selvi, played by a sincere Tamannaah Bhatia). This brings Saravanan (director-actor Sundar C) to dust off his bullwhip and hat and investigate his sister’s suspicious death. The director also (mindfully, one hopes) keeps away from excessive melodrama, restricting Saravanan and Selvi’s story to two-minute flashback montages. The same goes for the godawful romance plots that the lead actor and actress (in this case, Raashii Khanna) are often subjected to in a genre that can often be crass in Tamil cinema. Such disasters are tactfully averted to focus on two of its biggest moneymakers:  horror and comedy. But the problem is the film does this with the subtlety of a loud, stomach-churning PSA. 

Aranmanai 4 whips out quite literally every small cliché in the horror handbook. The checklist, which in retrospect would’ve made for a banger of a drinking game, includes a horror-induced comatose patient, a female ghost with tufts of long hair, small children, who were once part of a schmaltzy family, but now introduced to terror in a paranormal house, a forest where things come to die, mysterious smoke that can only be the conveyor of bad news, and of course cobras. Imagine all of this topped with a generous serving of jump scares and screeching music. Make no mistake, we all love a good campy horror comedy, which is a genre unto itself. But Aranmanai 4 simply presents the primary elements of this genre, without traces of any effort to meld the two.

It’s not that we aren’t used to seeing comedy tracks come in fresh after an overly sentimental scene. Or big laughs about something utterly frivolous (Yogi Babu and VTV Ganesh do the honours) right after we listen in on a big revelation about the scary ghost. But Aranmanai 4 does this with a frustrating sense of mediocrity. The jokes are unsurprisingly aimed at the lowest hanging fruit — either centred on a woman or conveniently mocking homoeroticism — to such an extent that even if it rarely lands (Kovai Sarala’s dalliances lighten the mood occasionally) it is still forgettable. 

But the biggest problem with Aranmanai 4 is still not all of these obvious templates. It lies in its temptations to needlessly glorify the lengths a mother will go to protect her children. While the film tries to bring in some amount of horror and invention to this plotpoint, we’re still left with one question. Yes, the ghost is always female, but why does she also have to be a mommy martyr? Filmmaker KS Ravikumar, in a remotely fun cameo, interjects a crucial flashback, irritated with doubt. “Don’t you lot usually just do a pooja and drive the ghost away?” The funniest moment in Aranmanai 4, everybody.